to, well not really the ridiculous – it was for charidee after all (and so naturally I don’t want to talk about it) – but it certainly was surreal.

After starting the day so well (see below), I popped over to South Kensington with my friend Helen to attend London’s first Sheep Race. There weren’t any real sheep in South Ken, natch, but we were treated to lunch and recorded highlights of a race that took place last week in the Welsh borders. We were reminded several times that this was London’s first Sheep Race, were spared too many jokes about sheep and randy Welshmen and happily got to give Children with Leukemia some money – overall the event raised just over £1,000.

A good morning for podcast listening on the train into London.

First up Morning Coffee Notes for April 14th from Dave Winer, in which he answers questions for Robert Scoble and Shel Israel about how and why he started blogging and what was the story with the creation of RSS, oh yeah and remembers he hasn’t paid his taxes…yet.

Then into Bicycle Mark‘s first Portugese-only Audio Communique #27 – “fantastica”…was just one of the words I managed to understand – but why does he talk about Madge so much – madge this, madge that. My experience of Portuguese (apart from my inability to spell it straight off – keep forgetting the second u, putting it in and then taking it out again) is that some words are easier to understand written down and some are easier to understand when spoken – so perhaps I’d be able to understand more of a film with subtitles – don’t know until you try.

Finally an IT Conversations/Tech Nation with Moira Gunn interviewing Keith Devlin from Stanford University about innate mathematical ability in humans and many other animals. It’s a really interesting conversation that walks the line between saying “Well….duh!” and “Hey there’s probably something interesting in this” Bonus point – Keith Devlin has a similar Northern English accent (at least to my ear) to David Gurteen – Now I’ll find that one’s from Liverpool and the other one’s from Hull!

Tag: podcasts

Recently I’ve been meaning to get this blog firmly back on the wider KM track. I’ve been particularly passionate about weblogging, tagging and borderline obsessive about podcasting (you probably didn’t notice…) but returning to David Gurteen‘s Knowledge Cafe tonight after a few months of not attending reminded me that these cool tools are just ways in which we do the important stuff, which is about how we manage the organisation of people. I resolve to make more links in future back to this core – yes making podcasts is cool, but I’m much more interested in using them in an organisational context, to improve corporate communications for example, than I am in becoming an amateur radio presenter.

The Knowledge Cafe tonight was pretty much a re-run of the networking session that Mick Cope did at the Gurteen Conference a little while ago – I had to leave dead on 8pm and so perhaps there were more insights in the after-exercise plenary, but it was also a useful, if wearing, opportunity to get up and think about giving and getting in a networking situation and to make some new, useful contacts, particularly for Public Service Conversations.

I guess the insight for me was that I rarely go into that sort of situation expecting to give AND to receive – I either call someone for help, and am entirely focused on my need, not expecting to have to give something in return, or else I call someone to offer help but am not open to how they might be able to help me out. I think I have quite a good handle on what I can offer people, but it seems to me that a useful exercise would be to have an ongoing wish-list – things I want that I can’t create on my own, but which someone else might have a surplus of, for those times when just such a person happens along.

Gurteen & knowledge cafe

I’ve tried all morning to think of something witty to say about this picture – I guess it speaks for itself.

However to anticipate the obvious questions: It was an awayday, it was about 1 o’clock in the morning, I was stone cold sober, and that’s not my hat.

If you don’t want awaydays that include such things, don’t hire me.

tags: daft apeth & awayday & banjo & daft ‘ap’orth

Thanks to Angela Morgan for the pic.

[Update: I’m reliably informed, by our Loughborough correspondent, that “daft apeth” should read “daft ‘ap’orth”. I apologise unreservedly to any daft ‘ap’orths to whom I have inadvertantly caused any offence or distress.]

As if the pleasure of face to face conversation with Suw Charman weren’t enough (less whining this time, more scheming… mwah-ha-ha) I also had a brief interlude where a caffeine-pusher barista engaged in conversation with me about my coffee-drinking habits and pressed some freebies (pictured) on me.

Oh boy, oh boy, I think this weekends going to go reeeeeeeeaaaaaaly quickly .

Tags: starbucks & schwag & charman

Suw looked up long enough for my camera to capture her, but the rest of the time she was clearly tapping away.

Johnnie Moore, Minkmedia , Luke Razzell and Connected Blog(with pictures) have all covered the Blogs in Action seminar at the Polish Club, courtesy of Six Apart & Nokia last night too.

All the panel had very cool, interesting stuff to say, but John Dale blogmeister for Warwick University came over, as others have noted, as the star turn of the evening.

I’m with Johnnie though on the style and format of the seminar – I thought the panel was great, I really enjoyed listening to them, but I’d have loved to have more chance to hear what others had to say and to engage in conversation with them. There are industries and communities where a top table talking to the crowd and revealing their arcane mysteries to the great unwashed is appropriate, but the blog world is much more democratic and is decentralized by its very nature – this form just didn’t work, for me, last night.

My frustration was exacerbated of course by my recent personal injury which meant that after two hours of sitting still, with a sore face and a numb bum, the last thing I felt up to was what Suw called “speed-mingling”. But even had I been 100%, I would have found a more interactive evening even more stimulating.

tags: SixApart & london & blogging

Ouch!

Just went out to get some lunch, walking through Stratford High St in East London, IT conversations on the player – Marc Canter talking about ourmedia.org and the internet archive – wow this is coo… BAMMM, strange floating sensation followed by face and knees scraping along pavement and then small birds twittering around my head.

My first reaction? Oh no here comes someone looking very concerned who wants to look after me – real playground stuff, “No, I’m alright, no really, thank you very much ” [limps off manfully, little tear on cheek]

Turns out I put one foot into a loop of discarded plastic tape (the stuff that holds boxes of photocopier paper together) and either put the other foot in it too or stepped on it with the other foot thus upending myself.

Pictures later – ie after the bleeding slows, but before my pride gets re-inflated. [update – no chance of ego reflation – kids way too amused]

Now if I’d been recording instead of listening….

tag: ouch

Just a quick plug for the Cafe in Ray’s Jazz Shop within Foyles in the Charing Cross Road.

Excellent coffee, great atmosphere, really cool music and a guy behind the bar who doesn’t really mind having his picture taken, I’m sure.

Plus free wifi for customers – way to go Ray! (contrast with Borders over the road who have a money-grubbing Starbucks wifi place on their first floor)

[Update] Well the guy didn’t say anything, but the woman (in black behind him) wasn’t too keen on me taking her photograph and popping it on my weblog without asking her permission – so I apologised, I forgot that I wasn’t really in a public place – another lesson in online living learned.

I just posted a comment on one of the threads around the Google Autolink debate, thusly:

“Is there another way of looking at this? It seems to me that the debate has only been framed so far in either…or terms, ie of the web either being read/writeable or read-only whereas actually it’s been both for some time. Some bits are information served up that could be enriched in any number of ways. Some bits need to be kept sacred. Some bits need to keep the original intact while comments and modifications can be added in an explicit way.

Would it be too complicated for those people who are happy for their content to be ripped, mixed and burned to insert some sort of flag or licence (heard this before somewhere?) in their html that allows for that and for those who wish to only have their stuff read and perhaps re-presented in an aggregator to have a different kind of licence?

Then if I get really pissed off with Dave ‘cos his content doesn’t get “enriched” in the way I like it, I can raise it with him, and he can ignore me if he wants to or change if he wants to – isn’t that a more grown up conversation than “This is evil!”, “Oh, no it’s not!”, “Oh yes it is!”…. ”

My gut is with Dave and Scoble on this, but I have this nagging feeling that saying “Autolinks is bad for the web” sounds too much like “P2P is bad for the recording industry”

AutoLink

One of my top new projects this year is to establish a (large) network of people working in public services in the UK. The idea is that there are plenty of people in public service who essentially do a very similar job to one another – it just happens to be serving a particular geographic area/population or it’s about a particular service to the public or policy area.

The network will give these people an opportunity to come together, show off about what they’re doing, find out what others are doing and just generally chat with people who understand the issues they face (because…durrr… they face them too). I’m kind of thinking of an ecademy for public servants.

My intended part in this is to host and facilitate the online world of this network and the even more important offline, face to face meetings between these people.

What’s different I hope from the networking opportunities that people have is that I don’t want to be prescriptive by constraining which groups of people talk to each other. There are niche networks for people who are interested in, say, performance measurement in social services in local councils in London. But where is there that people at the Home Office can engage with people from Bristol Council and the Audit Commission at the same time let alone with the serendipitous possibility that someone from a PCT in East Anglia might have recently been working on just the thing that they’re interested in and is eager to show off her learning?

Of course if people want to have narrower, area or policy specific conversations there too then that’s fine.

At the moment I’m looking at community-building software for the online bit and talking to some of the cleverer people I know about what would be really useful and how it should be done.

If you want to contribute to the conversation, then please feel free to, either here in the comments or by e-mail to lloyd AT perfectpath etc.